


Starks, Sparks, and Atom Bombs

by anglheadedhpstr



Series: Roots and Wings [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Drug Abuse, F/M, Self Harm, Underage Drinking, please don't read if this offends or bothers you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-01
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-10 19:19:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1163487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anglheadedhpstr/pseuds/anglheadedhpstr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim Rogers on why he's pretty sure that the scientists studied Pippin Stark when creating the atom bomb.</p><p>(And why it hurts.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starks, Sparks, and Atom Bombs

**Author's Note:**

> So my friend and I (who are major fandom people who spend most of our time having feels) decided one day that the only way to make the Avengers better is to give them kids. So we did. We created their families their histories and their lives. And because we're sick, sick, people we also decided that people needed to die.  
> This is what happened.

Pippin Stark was what they studied when they created the atom bomb.  Something moving so quickly toward collision until it meets there and explodes.  Or, that’s what Jim Rogers thinks anyway.

 

_When you were here before couldn’t look you in the eye. You’re dressed like an angel. Your skin makes me cry._

_**** _

It’s probably the hottest day that the year is going to make, and the patio at the top of the Avengers tower is stuffed with people and party decorations.  A huge banner screaming “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” is strung across the doors, and laughter is heavy.

Jim can’t stop staring at little Pippin Stark.  It might be her sixth birthday, but she’s running things like she’s one of the grownups, and it’s so hard to look at her without being blinded, even at this age, even when he doesn’t fully understand what it means to be awed by someone.

This is his first true, clear memory of who Pippin stark really is and it’s important.

Important because it ends with Tony Stark holding Pippin up in the sunlight so she can feel one of the few breezes blow her ginger tresses across her face.

“I’m flying, Daddy!”

Jim remembers it because he knows the look that is on Uncle Tony’s face.  He’s felt it his whole life.

 

_You float like a feather in a beautiful world._

They’re fourteen and thirteen now, and it’s weird cause Pippin is starting to take an interest in things that are definitely not what Jim wants to talk about, (make up and boys and the music her dad listens to).  And it’s still okay when Pippin actually brushes her hair once in a while and tries to clean the oil from her fingers.  It’s okay even when it isn’t, not really, because Jim isn’t going to tell anyone that he loves it when she leaves smudges she couldn’t or didn’t wipe off on him.

He’s pretty sure he likes it so much because he knows she does it on purpose.

He might be the tiny asthmatic kid of Captain America but his mind is always free to think about things that are important.

 

_I wish I was special._

It was the way Starks worked, Jim realized on a sunny day on the eve of Pippin’s seventeenth birthday.  They marked what was theirs.

It was barbaric, sure, and Jim was very pressed to draw a dog like caricature of Tony doing exactly that, but he couldn’t deny the way his heart pumped quicker when he notices a smudge of black right under his palm on his wrist.

That’s her spot, just like the bright red lipstick mark on her father’s cheek is hers too.

Jim is very proud that he's part of a list Pippin keeps mentally of the people that are hers.

(It's three people long. Tony, Bruce, and him.)

 

_You’re so fucking special._

They are seventeen and sixteen when it happens.  When asked Jim will give you the date and time but he can never tell you why any of them were there. Why the Avengers had to dress in their fancy Stark paid and Captain approved formal wear and why Jim had to stand there, his newly large hands picking at his tie.

Jim will never be able to tell you why because, really, it doesn't _matter_.

He’s standing next to Pippin and they’re both sipping at their drinks, (“Non-alcoholic, can’t have you guys dancing on the tables and showing these guys how to party” had been Tony’s explanation when they were first given the drinks by Jim’s father) while they both people watched.  Jim kept himself anchored to ground - not quite used to the growth spurts the serum he inherited from his father gave him) by holding onto the peach colored floral pattern of her dress.  Pippin filled the silence with some story about her and Bruce in the lab while Jim not so subtly didn’t pay attention in favor of watching the way her hair glinted in the sun.  It almost looked like fire from where he stood.  He also found himself enraptured by the peppermint she held between her teeth.

And then the peace ended.  Like every single nightmare Jim had when he first realized what it truly meant when his family went to work screams tore through the crowd as a plume of smoke rose into the sky.  He tried to hold Pippin’s hand but she was already running, running toward the sound when it happened again, and then again.

 

_But I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?_

 

The papers and news sites and magazines will only run three different photos for the next fortnight.

Under the headlines _ATTACK ON THE AVENGERS: NEW YORK MOURNS TONY STARK_  is a photoshopped image of Tony at a charity gala, his body pasted over a grainy cell phone photo of his body lying in the middle of what used to be a garden party surrounded by peach floral pattern spotted with his own blood and pieces of shrapnel, the hand of Pepper peeking out from a white blanket, and Captain America and his son trying to convince a screaming seventeen year old woman to stand up and walk away from the obvious trams of holding her dead father's body.

(She doesn't walk away, really. Jim has to grab her hand, her arm, and then lift her body up and carry her with her arms wrapped around his neck and the stains of Tony's blood and her screams between them as his dad keeps them both standing wits strong arms wrapped around them.)

The capturer of the photo - a man in his twenties who was part of the first responders - was paid a million dollars for the shot.  He subsequently lost all of it and a bit more and his job after Jarvis was done.  It would never make up for the fact that every time Jim walked down a street for days and saw that photo all he could think of was strangled sobs, screams of grief, and Pippin’s shaky voice in his ear after he finally got her up and out of there and tried to help her deal with her father’s blood sinking into her clothes.

_“I can’t get it out Jim.  I can’t get it out.  How do I get it out. Jim. It’s not coming out I can’t I can’t-”_

The next, what seems to be a line up of every Avenger and child, even the brood from Asgard, dressed in mourning wear with Steve and Bruce surrounding Pippin is on top of the next headline.   _S_ _TARK HEIRESS SPEAKS FOR LOST PARENTS_.

While Jim may want to punish people for that photo it was legally taken after an astoundingly large amount of money is paid in a contract with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s PR team for certain journalists to be allowed to cover the private (but nationally televised two weeks later) funeral. It’s not even his own crying face that bothers him.  It’s that dead thing in Pippin’s eyes.  The thing that grew when she started to speak a eulogy that was to end the procession, (of which included the mayor, the president, and his own dad), and stopped in the middle of the first note card.  She threw the bundle to the side smiling humorlessly at the fluttering paper as if she was in on some new kind of joke that they hadn’t heard,  (but he saw Colonel Rhodes’ face and he knew it was something) and then looked straight out into the crowd and spoke only-

_“I’m not doing this. I can’t do this without my father.”_

The news wouldn’t stop asking what she couldn’t do for days until-

The third picture didn’t need a headline but it had one anyway.   _WHAT IS STARK DOING?_ on top of a surprisingly clear camera phone capture of Pippin downing what is probably her fourth drink in a bar as lights flash behind her.  Her bandages are gone, but the shadows and bruises on her arms are visible and Jim is pretty sure he hears Uncle Bruce hulking out downstairs when he sees it.

Jim’s not sure if it’s his imagination, but when he has to draw something later that night he draws this picture - and there are tear tracks down her face.

****

_I don’t belong here._

Months go by like this.  Pippin present and walking and talking in the tower but never really there while she does something or another in the lab or tries to pretend to be okay.

But she _isn’t_.  Jim’s not sure when he started noticing, but she’s too thin now, the piles of peppermints by her door go uneaten, and Jim’s pretty sure he isn’t even talking to a person half the time because she never answers. And Pippin's always supposed to have something to say.

He finds the reason why when he walks into the lab after a message from Jarvis to find Pippin sleeping on the half broken cot her father abandoned thirty minutes before that damn garden party with a half empty bottle of whiskey in one hand and what Jim seriously hopes is really powdered sugar but knows it isn’t on the workbench.

He pulls the bottle from her hand and sets it on the ground and picks her small body up and carries her to her room.  He deposits her on the bed, has Jarvis start monitoring her, and goes to her lab and proceeds to destroy all of it that he can touch except for what he knows are Tony’s things and DUM-E.

He never sees Pippin doing any of it again, but sometimes she comes home from a weekend out and Jim knows that glassy look to her eyes and he wants to pull every bit of her apart and shake it until it fits together right again.

_I don’t care if it hurts.  I want to have control._

****

As much as he wants to, Jim agrees with everyone else that forcing Pippin to get better and dragging her away from herself would be worse than what she’s doing now.  So instead of grabbing her and locking her in his room until she’s okay they let her leave for days and show up with glassy eyes, a new party dress, hair not tangled from working in the lab, and at least ten new photos of her drunk or stoned on TMZ.

(Those are the nights where he spends hours lying on the ground in front of Uncle Bruce as they make plans to find some way to stop her as Jim throws a baseball into the air and Bruce types away at his Starkpad.

They don't actually do anything with the plans but Jim always liked the one that included bribing JARVIS and some sneaky sleuthing on Aunt Tasha's part.)

It keeps going like this and even though he can’t stand it Jim deals with it with everyone else because whole Bruce and he have plans the only plan all of the Avengers have is the only one that actually keeps Pippin alive. They keep sharp things away from her, although they can’t hide everything if the healing marks on her body are anything to go by, they keep all liquor from the house, and they don’t mention their worry to her.  It’s awful because it soon becomes that they say nothing to her instead because there starts to be a point where any polite conversation will turn into "So what drugs did you do last night?" instead of a comment on the weather. So they keep silent.

But one night she falls into his room instead of hers and she’s throwing up into his wastebasket and crying and Jim can’t stop himself from asking why.

_“I can’t do this.  I can’t be him.  I can’t do the things he did and everyone wants me to but I can’t be that great so I’m just going to do this, okay? I’m going to do something he did."_

(The worst thing is that Jim knows that Uncle Tony existed. He'd heard of it in teasing comments from his father and Pepper and once a long time ago from Nick Fury. He'd also once went through Tony's large expanse of memorabilia that included all of the old magazines he'd been in before Iron Man but all he can think about is the look on Tony's face when he seriously thought about who he was before then. Jim shakes in anger when he remembers that expression, because it was a little bit embarrassment, disappointment and a whole ton of self hatred.)

****

_I want a perfect body. I want a perfect soul._

****

Eventually months turn to years and Pippin’s no longer falling off the rails but her eyes are still glassy and she has an odor of smoke and liquor but she’s functioning.  She’s making things in the lab, she’s talking to humans, and, most importantly to America a, she’s running a company.

It’s different, though.  There’s no snark wars with Jarvis, no funny commentary when they look out the window to people watch, and she’s Pippin but she’s not and Jim can’t take it.  He leaves for college with Taylor and Avery Barton, knowing he’ll be the oldest undergraduate there but anything is better than seeing Pippin coming home with bruises on her neck he didn’t put there and pictures to prove it in the tabloids.

 

_I want you to notice. When I’m not around._

****

The years go by slowly and aside from holidays and some summers they don’t see Pippin unless it’s in the news where she has either changed the world or changed partners.

Jim tries really hard not to care.

She spends a lot of time in the city his University is in and he tries not to let himself think it's some weird game of hers because he promised himself he'd never let it get that far and he hates admitting failure. So that's why when she texts him and asks him to go out he says no, he has to study, but be safe please because he's seen the assholes that go to those bars.

It’s two a.m. on that Friday and Jim has fought his way through term papers and a jubilant celebration with Taylor and Avery over the end of final exams (and for him, college) and is now lying awake in bed when disaster walks in wearing red high heels and a painted smile.

(He sees her wristband and knows exactly what bar she's been to and it bothers him that he knows now because he knows what happens when she's not there and he doesn't delude himself anymore.)

Pippin kicks off the heels and hikes the ends of her coctail dress up high enough so that she can straddle Jim before he so much as moves.  It’s like all those dreams he’d had before except it isn’t because Jim feels tears on her cheeks and her mouth tastes like whiskey and not peppermints and it’s so wrong, wrong, wrong that Jim pulls her hands from his chest where she’d been pulling at his shirt after dragging off her dress.

“Pip-”

And then instead of him her hands are digging into her own body, fingers poking into dents and scars from shrapnel and Jim pulls her hands from herself and begs her.

“Stop, Pippin, what are you doing?”

Her smile shakes more than her hands and she leans her forehead to his, and then it’s not a smile anymore but a picture of painted grief.

_“I don’t want to anymore, Jim. I don’t want to remember what it feels like to bleed.”_

_She's running out the door._

****  
****

Instead of going straight home Jim asks his dad if he can borrow the bike and takes a trip around the country. It's when even the smallest gas station he can find has her picture on the magazines six months later that he decides he's done running from whoever she is now.

He spends the whole drive back remembering who Pippin used to be and imaging her with him in that moment.

 

_She’s running out. She runs runs runs..._

****

Jim’s first month back in the tower is a lesson in restraint.  After his trip he can only find himself thinking about the old Pippin. The girl with peppermint breath who when she spoke stood so close to him he could see every secret in her eyes.  Not this dead hollow shell with scared arms and a self hating smile that welcomes him back with a slap on the back, a shot of whisky, and a wave as she leaves to go to the lab again.

 **** (She doesn't even wait for him to drink the whiskey, so he dumps it down the drain and pats DUM-E as the machine rumbles sadly.)

 **** He can’t get used to it again and maybe it’s the fact that he still is waiting for her, and only her.  (He had a date, once in college, but it went horribly wrong when the bar they were at starting playing the entertainment news and the girl wouldn’t stop talking about “That Pippin Stark” as pictures of a fiery redhead and some unnamed buffoon played tonsil hockey over a surprisingly large amount of empty glasses, a mirror and a razor.) He has said no to girls who could be so easy to be happy with for her and he is as angry with her for not seeing that as he is angry at himself for believing that maybe she would even know.

 **** His anger leads him to run downstairs about two months after he got back, only to find the lab empty and a video screen on pause.

 **** “She asked me to show you this should you come down, Sir,” and Jarvis starts the recording of a gold and red suit taking flight and the time stamp makes him doubly positive that it's not Tony in that suit.

 **** Jim’s blood runs cold and for the second time in his life, he destroys the lab.

****

_Runs..._

****

He doesn’t leave after. He picks up an overturned crate, plops it right in front of the disassembly array and is there when Pippin lands the suit and then tumbles out of it.  She’s crawling on her knees to the desk behind him, her hands pushing away debris and it’s the utter look of defeat on her face as she sits against the desk, sees Jim’s face, and cries that makes him not yell at her like he’s wanted to do for the past six years.

 **** “I wanted to make them burn.”  She says as he walks to her and crouches in front of her.  She winds her arms around him, hiding her face in his chest.  “I wanted to make them burn and they did but what am I supposed to do now? I found them and they’re gone and there’s nothing left for me to do anymore. What do I do now?"

 **** Jim pulls her face away from his body and gently tilts it toward his.  “No more, Pip.”  He presses his lips to her forehead.  “No more of this.”

****

_Whatever makes you happy. Whatever you want._

****

There are good days and bad days now, and sometimes they run in a string that gets them excited or heartbroken but they get through it. Pippin keeps the suit, builds some more, and Jim makes himself okay with that because he knows why she's doing it now. It's the same reason he carries his fathers shield.

 **** She stands at the patio, staring into the sun as she smokes her fourth cigarette and the wind blows just right and she tilts her head into it.

 **** If James could do one thing it would be to capture that moment where her gold party dress ruffles in the wind, her whole body alight from the same force that comes from the atom bomb.

 **** She hears him walking up before he gets to her, and she turns her body to lean against the railing red nails tapping against the metal.

 **** “Your guests are wondering where you are, birthday girl.”

“Flying,” she jokes, tilting her head back into the breeze.  She opens her eyes then, pauses in her smoke, and turns around again, watching as she drops the half smoked cigarette to the streets below.

 **** “I can’t seem to get the hang of this party thing.”  She says it softly, and Jim knows what she means.

 **** “No one wants them, Pippin.  They want you.”

 **** She looks up at him and smiles.

 **** “Yeah, I am pretty spectacular.”

****

_You’re so fucking special. I wish I was special._

 

**Author's Note:**

> So there you go. If you enjoyed this piece of heartbreak (you sick masochist you) then hop on over [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1152081) for my friend's take on how this would have happened.
> 
> You will not be disappointed.
> 
> Lyrics are obviously from Radiohead's [Creep](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFkzRNyygfk).
> 
> Find some more info about our universe [here](http://rootsandwingsuniverse.tumblr.com).


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